writing

"All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea."

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

"The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."

"you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will."

"I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r"

"The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing."

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon."

"Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day."

"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."

"You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ."

"I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world’s most perfect haiku."

"It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand."

"Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing."

"Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything."

"The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."

"I write to find out what I'm talking about."

"Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency,"or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery."

"Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly."